Modern Brand Building

I've been getting increasingly frustrated with some companies I have spoken to and their treatmant/attitude to their own brand (I won't name them right now, as we're currently tracking their activity as part of some client reasearch we're doing).

Company1:
Has no brand manual (the logo use varies from campaign to campaign, fonts are varied, writing style is confused, etc.) yet they think they have a great brand. It seems that sales are declining in their high-specialised market right now, but this is the 'customers fault for not understanding them'.

Company2:
Has a great 'brand bible', put together less than a year ago by a highly-paid brand consultancy, yet has started to ignore these guidelines because the person who commissioned/championed the work has left (they went on to bigger & better things). They have now been replaced with someone who wants to put their own "emphasis on things".

The thoughts that my companyIdeal Interface have taken from this experience has been:

1. Document your brand (if you don't know, how are your customers going to?)
2. Take every opportunity to use your branding across all channels
3. Be consistent, be very consistent

So once again, I find myself referring to the work of Mr Paul Isakson and his thoughts on branding in the modern age:
http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation

Motrin apologies

An update:

Following a social media outcry, McNeil Healthcare (the parent company) have issued an apology on the homepage of their website http://www.motrin.com/




As well as this, they have also issued apologies via email to concerned customers and pledged to remove all occurences of the offending advert as quickly as possible.

This apology seems to have been relatively well received:
http://www.ladybuglandings.com/2008/11/motrin-heard-the-news/

I'm sure there will be several commentators out there who will provide their opinion on this series of events, but here's my main bullet points:

• Following the backlash, McNeil Healthcare, and in particular its VP if Marketing, seem to have responded over the weekend and today (I guess time will tell how badly this has affected brand and revenues)
• Several Motrin names on Twitter have now been taken by 'concerned' individuals (I'll not post who they are, as I don't think they have acted entirely in the public's best interest)
• Brands can no longer afford to ignore social media and should take steps to monitor the mentions and sentiment all the time

Further reading:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120519
and
http://www.myfoxny.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=7880169&version=5&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.3.1

A social media crisis for Motrin

Word has reached these shores of a Social Media backlash to the TV adverts for Motrin a painkiller in the US.

The ad targetted mums who carry their child in a sling on their body and went on to mention how this this is fashionable and gives you back pain. They haven't gone as far as to say "your child is a pain in the neck", but a lot of people took offence to the clip, blogging about it:
(e.g. http://shakethesalt.com/2008/11/motrin-the-anti-mom/ ) and using Twitter. (At this time of writing, the http://www.motrin.com/ website is even down).

Judge for yourself :



This is a warning to every brand. Your customers could take offence, even at your highly-researched campaign, especially if it targets a sensitive section of the population (e.g. new mums). Make sure you have plans in place for how to deal with this sort of crisis and learn from how other companies respond.
(Note to Motrin: Perhaps taking down your own website at a point like this isn't the best policy?)

Predicting the future

As I look forward to becoming a father in 2009, I've been thinking about what the future has in store over the next year. This therefore brought me round to think about how companies can use modern methods of communication to try and predict what lies ahead.

Astrology, tarot cards, tea leaves, etc. have now been replaced by: scenario modelling, data-mining and a lot of computation & analysis. However I can help but think that this is still similar to palm reading and its ilk. Why? Well, it still uses one critial part of the system that is fallable... the human component!


Although a single human may be considerably inaccurate at predicting the future (Old Moore, Nostradamas, etc.), is a collective group of humans any good at guessing what happens next? Well, on the basis of the recent financial crisis, it would seem not , but perhaps there is light at the end of the predictive tunnel....

The recent USA Presidential Campaign was

Integrity and why we have forgotten about it?

OK, I've focused a few of my postings over the last few months on brand values used by companies (e.g. this one on Human Attributes). These are often words such as: Trustworthy, Transparent, Approachable, Innovation, Collaboration, etc.

But after reading through many of these from different companies, I've noticed one word missing from the collective bunch... Integrity


Why is this?

Why do companies not include "The steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code" as a differentiator? http://www.thefreedictionary.com/integrity

New York Times is spoofed

I was sent an email by a friend yesterday, who told me about a free version of the New York Times they apparently picked up yesterday. After they read the surprise headline 'Iraq War Ends' and saw the date of 4th July 2009, they realised it might not be genuine.

A quick search on the web, shows that the NYT actually noticed as well:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/pranksters-spoof-the-times/

It seems that newspapers still have a role in getting the message across, but its perhaps more worrying that they had to give away the 1.4 million printed copies of this hoax, rather than charge the cover price for what is obviously a great souvenir!

Virgin Airlines and Facebook....

... the problem otherwise known as 'the case for segmenting your personal Social Graph'.

For those who aren't aware, Virgin Airlines recently sacked 13 of its staff for calling its passengers 'chavs' and apparently criticising the company's safety standards

“There is a time and a place for Facebook. But there is no justification for it to be used as a sounding board for staff of any company to criticise the very passengers who pay their salaries.”

"But hang on.... this is Virgin Atlantic Airlines" I hear people say. "They are the 'fly in the British Airways ointment', the company that has a Facebook page with quotes from Richard Branson, endorsements by James Bond and they actively encourage their customers to take silly photos of your free DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) socks as you travel the globe with them".

But, in my opinion there is a definite difference between a company presenting itself in a friendly way on a social networking site and the action of some employees venting their frustrations and opinions on the same platform.

Is this therefore not a principle case for segmenting the different contacts in an individual's Facebook account? Surely to have: work colleagues, school mates, customers and everyone else all seeing everything you say or do is not what anyone really wants? Wouldn't it be better to classify some aquaintances in one way (e.g. Business contacts) and others in another way (e.g. people I can say what I like to)?

Classification and segmentation of a personal social graph must obviously be the next step for all multi-purpose social networks (or over vertical/market-specific social networks that allow you to import your entire social graph). Perhaps following that segementation, companies will be likely to follow-suit and understand just who within their Corporate Social Graph they can have contact with and what that contact should be.

Michael Rosenblum tells it like it is

Forward thinking Michael Resenblum tells it like it is this week whilst backstage at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol:

His words during the conference were very powerful. Quotes such as:

“Any idiot can do this, making TV is not hard, it's not complicated, it's not difficult. The technology makes it incredibly simple.”

were meant to galvanise publishers into thinking more about cost-effective TV production and less about paper. It the news that's inportant, not how its delivered.

A failed experiment

I've been following a rather heated debate started by Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 on the failed business models of traditional (old) publishing. He's had some intersting debate, mainly thanks to his main challenge that newspapers aren't entitled to make a profit just because they think its a valued venture.

Or to quote him directly:

Nobody has the right to a business model.

Amen to this! The World is filled with people who had a great but failed idea. Why should the newspaper industry survive just because:

• "that's always the way we've done things"
• "that's what I trained for"
• "we helped bring down a government in the 1970's"
• etc.

Now I've already covered this subject in a post back in April "What does press2.0 really mean?" but to put it more succinctly.

We may eventually find that the profitable running of a newspaper was a failed experiment!

Better than free

I've covered the subject of the gift economy previously in my posting Open Source Your Idea. But thought it needed further coverage. This happens when the economies of scale work on a global level (thanks to the Internet) and the cost of distribution becomes almost zero (but never really really reaches it), it becomes a business advantage to give at least part of your products away (and is still recommended as a strategy by some eminent VC's).
For example, just take a look at how many 'lite', 'freemium' or 'trial' versions of software packages there are out there (I'm currently a sucker for the demo / trial versions of applications on my iPhone).

So, you've recouped the cost of development, shown it costs you virtually nothing to produce a copy (e.g. software, an idea, a process, etc.) and then your strongest competitor comes along with something...... and charges for it. What makes it worse is that customers pay for it, a lot of them.

So how does that work?

Well according to Kevin Kelly, a great modern thinker, Editor-At-Large for Wired magazine and Author of the 1997 book New Rules for the New Economy (which still holds true 11 years on), there are 8 reasons for paying for something rather than settling for a free version:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalisation
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability

Basically, there are several reasons why paid-for stuff is better than free.

It therefore strikes me, in these modern and leaner times, that companies need to reconsider if the really need to give everything away and that this may be the difference between profit & loss (and therefore economic survival).

Customer Service makes a difference in crunch times

As my old Economics teacher used to say "in a perfect market, all prices are known and the market finds its equilibrium quickly". And thanks to all sorts of online innovations (e.g comparision sites) the price of similar products (e.g. groceries) and services (e.g. insurnace) becomes increasingly easy to compare. These items therefore get increasingly competitive (e.g. near enough the same everywhere).

Therefore, assuming the quality remains constant, the only real competitive edge comes in the delivery and support of the item. In other words, the service provided, either during the transaction or afterward, becomes the difference.

This is especially true online, where customers think they get a lesser service compared to in-store. This is proven in a recent survey, where eight out of ten consumers believed they get better customer service in-store, rather than on the internet or over the telephone. What's even more surprising (especially in these more-frugal times of a recession) is that 73.4% say they are prepared to pay more for a product if they receive a better service in-store.

Tim Ogle, CEO at Retail Eyes , who did the survey is quoted as saying:

The public has spoken - even when their pockets are stretched in times of financial adversity like now, they are prepared to pay for quality of service.

UK retailers face tough time

Recently I was appalled to find out that there is an insolvency specialist who has compiled a list of 323 retailers it thinks stand a 70% or greater chance of going under by the New Year.

The idea is that banks will continue to finance retailers over the coming Christmas period, when a lot of retailers make a significant proportion of their money, This will be in the hope that this revenue is enough to keep them afloat.

The role of companies like Begbies Traynor is to rescue companies about to go under. Its therefore good business for corporate insolvency specialists to identify those who are not doing good business (think of this as the equivalent of a corporate dead pool)

Mark Fry of Begbies Traynor said:

"There is every chance we will witness a rash of retail failures at the start of 2009"

Gulp!

Suffering Election Burnout?

If you've already had enough of the USA elections, you could be suffering from election burnout.

But share a though for those gamers currently playing the new Burnout Paradise xBox360 console game. This is currently one of the screen shots captured from a particularly slippery part of the xBox Live course:

Thanks to Dan Shust over at Resourch Interactive for the image.

Although this story has now been picked-up by several of the mainstream media such at the UK Telegraph, what nobody has so-far done is identify who these targetted adverts are aimed at.

However, I think I now have identified who this online gaming population segment are and may even have captured one of them mid-play:

Zombies

Given the shenanigans going on in the USA today, I thought this old Bob Hope clip was quite funny!

Multi-channel madness

Its not enough these days to be great just online or to make lots of sales on the High Street (unless you're a discount retailer, that's not really happening these days). No, you now have to be good across a range of different sales or communication options... known as multi-channel.

But how do you make sense of it all? Well, if you are using more than one communication or retail channel, then you need to think about how to leverage these touch-points so that you get the right mix of: message, content, sales, support and whatever else.
So, if you:

• Advertise online to get customers into store
• Provide a kiosk for an online newspaper
• Sell online and have customers collect from store

Then you've probably found out already how mad it can be.

But are you providing the mix that your customers want? For example, in the US earlier this year, retail customers cited the 'Ability to return merchandise to a a store, even if it was purchased online or over the phone' as the feature they desired the most from multichannel.

For those about to embark on this epic journey, multi-channel comes with its own set of challenges, including:

• The analysis (and decision) of what channels to implement
• Identifying the right metrics/KPI's across channels (and then actually measuring & acting on them)
• Organizational impact from exisiting 'siloed' departments
• Maintaining the message consistency across channels
• Finding or building the central technology to manage the whole thing
• Integration of the data between disparate systems

I'm going to try an focus on these challenges (and quite possibly more) in forthcoming posts and try to figure out how to avoid or resolve them. Hopefully it won't make us all mad in the process.

I've been to the future... and its not good news

I brought this back with me as proof....

Search Engine Optimisation: Art or Science?

I'm not an expert on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and leave this to people who know far more about this subject than myself. But in one conversation on this subject with a few Internet industry people recently, we ended up discussing whether SEO is an art or a science, and I thought this was a great topic to mention further.
Now I've previously said (in various forums and presentations) that online marketing itself is more a science than an art, but this has been based more around:

1. writing an online marketing plan/strategy
2. implementing it
3. analysing it
4. learning from it
5. refining it
6. etc.

However the work of an SEO person is less easy to test as:

• You don't get immediate results (spiders take time to crawl)
• Variable amounts of content are produced about each term (making organic search results varied)
  New content is constantly produced
• The exact ranking/prioritisation of search results are closely guarded secrets
• The algorithms behind these results can change over time
• Each search engine has different algorithms(and a bunch of other more technical things that get increasingly complex the more you ask on the subject)

No wonder you need a PhD to understand this stuff!

From this lack of immedate results springs a set of businesses that are focused on spreading theory, rumour and suggestions, then testing them to destruction... the SEO industry. This is hardly a scientific community and one where discussion boards are regularly set alight by the merest hint of actual information.

For clients who use these services though, SEO agencies can perform wonderful feats of illusion and in some cases magic (one apparently even made BMW's German site disappear from Google for a while back in 2006).

But hang on, there may be a glimmering light out there in Optimisation Land. Some people are actually trying to put the science back into search. For example Professor Mike Thewell (who has the wonderful title of "Professor of Information Science and leader of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton" - didn't Doctor Who face him back in the 1970's?) has recently started blogging over at http://linkrelationships.com/ on exactly this topic.

His intial post on Scientific SEO sums things up nicely:

But at the end of the day decisions are based upon gut feel and received wisdom:
art rather than science

His research & insight (which can be brain-hurting to mere mortals) should be interesting to watch over time, as he divulges more about his research. If academics are to eventually try and add credibility to what was previously just subjectivity and conjecture, surely that cannot be a bad thing?

My verdict... For now, lets call SEO work a 'craft'. Something that is on its way to absolute definition and measurement, but still shrouded in arcane terms such as 'black hat' and spiders.

(I think it must be Halloween soon)

Where do all the bloggers live?

A quick posting (as I've been at the eCommerce Exibition in London today), but I was interested to find out where all the people who write blogs come from.

Luckily in their recent report, 'The State of the Blogosphere' Technorati provide the answer:





I'm actually quite suprised, not that North America is so well represented, but that Asia and South America are not. More investigation is perhaps required.

Apology Accepted

Whilst attempting to write a post last week I was frustrated to be told by Blogger (the online service that powers this blog):

Well, at least they have apologised (twice). And in this world of spin, mis-representation and blamestorming there’s a lot to be said for apologising when something goes wrong.

E.g.
Q: What do you do when you are technical news site that relies on user-generated content, which then disappears when you have a technical glitch?
A: You put a news article out explaining what happened and encourage comments
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081023/1124452627.shtml
Not that surprisingly, the community has responded with sympathy and not lambasted the site.

Compare this with the ‘issue’ over at Amazon, where reviews of a computer game were accidentally deleted/removed/hidden [delete as appropriate] with no apology and just a comment by a spokesperson that:

"Amazon did not knowingly or consciously choose to remove the reviews. The team is working on resolving this issue now and restoring all the reviews on the site."

To be fair to the online retailer, this could have been a one-off technical problem….
… were it not for the fact that negative comments of a game by the same manufacturer (and a major supplier of games to Amazon) were also removed a while back. [cough]

However, if you want to see a 'proper' company apology, take a look at the one from David Needleman the CEO of JetBlue airlines, written by him when customers were left stranded for significant time due to weather (and possibly bad service).
Note: This is the man who writes to individual letters called 'Blue Notes' to staff in his company who show superb customer service.

As Mr Needleman puts it on behalf of his company:

Nothing is more important than regaining your trust

SNCR announces 2008 winners

Those forward-thinking Fellows of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) have announced their choices for their awards this year.

Visionary of the Year:
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, whose book Groundswell sits on many of my peers' bookshelves (and mine included, when I get it back from a client I lent it to)

Innovator of the Year:
Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams the founders of Twitter.
(Which I mist admit to using, but less-so recently)

Brand of the Year:
Dell, for making the most in-roads to using new communications technologies, etc.
(E.g. For Dell Idea Storm, PR Blog, etc.)

Note: I'll obviously take credit for mentioning all of these winners in this blog and therefore expect my honorary membership to be in the post tomorrow [grin].

7 years old today, but what was it?

In 2001 Apple revealed their new $400 baby to the world. Back then a much heavier, 5Gb, Mac-only, low-battery-life version was announced by Steve Jobs as the device that

"puts a thousand songs in your pocket."

Yes, 7 years ago today the first iPod was launched.

(For those who are really interested, you can read about the lifetime of the music player at http://www.ipodhistory.com/ - should you be that way inclined)

Today and 100’s of millions of white headphones sales later, they make up 29% of the company’s revenue.

[source]

The Super Influencer

As part of a piece of research I've been doing for a startup I'm working with, I've revisited the Universal McCann research 'When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?' that I mentioned in a previous post.

Peer-to-peer influence is a strange thing when you investigate it further. Now, thanks to social media and the 'always connected' society, everyone has the potential to influence everyone else. However, "not all influencers are created equal" as the report says. This has therefore created a new breed of Super Influencer! (Fabio Turel goes into more analysis about the report's findings here).

However, what the report does mistakenly do is depict the network of connectivity between individuals as a set of 1-to-1 connections .





I'm sure the visuals done were not meant to be exactly representative of the exact web of connections the report goes into more detail about, but were done by a graphic artist to a brief. However, had his/her brief been a little more realistic it may have looked something more like this:





http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/03/social_network_physics_visualization.html
(a social network data visualization based on a model that is based on "mobile particles that randomly bounce off each other")

Google to research social influence

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, Google has a patent pending on technology for ranking the most influential people on social networking sites. Althought Google is declining to talk about it further, it is understood to be based on similar solution to Google's PageRank algorithm (Not named after the ranking of 'web pages' but after 'Larry Page', the person who developed it and one of the top 3 people at Google).

If this works as planned, it could give an influence ranking of you and your contacts, potentially charging more for the advertising on the pages on more influential people (and therefore potentially appying a value to the individual's social graph).

Don't confuse celebrity with influence

The cult of celebrity has gripped the 21st Century pretty firmly. You only have to plot the appearances of reality television participants and the webpages devoted to talent-less hotel empire heiresses, to see how much this phenomenon has grown.

(Hint: if you actually do want to plot the popularity of those in the public eye, see sites such as http://qdos.com/ and MSN's xRank service)

Celebrity is also not just a traditional media focus, it affects digital media as well. 4 of the top 10 entertainment sites are blogs and actors, (soda) pop stars & others take up a significant amount of the top search engine places, with some stars' search results very likely to infect your PC from dodgy downloads such as screensavers.

So, are these pop-stars, footballers, models and other media darlings true influencers?

Not necessarily!

The relationship between a celebrity and their fan base is often termed 'Parasocial', meaning:

“the seeming face-to-face relationship that develops between a viewer and a
mediated personality”

This one-sided affair, increased thanks to 24 hour coverage of cultural icons, creates false / insecure relationships that are not an exact replica of the day-to-day relationships that normal people have. If influence is the ability of an individual to affect another's behaviour, then technically celebrties do have influence. For example in research by Cole & Letts in 1999 they found that 9% of the young people in their study stated that their idols had influenced some aspect of their attitudes and beliefs.


However, don't confuse the two. Just because a celebrity looks attractive or has something to say (most do), it doesn't make them automatic influencers. Others (Boon & Lomore 2001) has shown that while some participants in a Canadian study indicated strong attractions to their celebrity idols, the participants did not feel they were inspired to change their own behaviour based on those celebrities’ lives, choices or accomplishments.

Online UK adverising set to grow despite economy woes

I've previously covered the expectation of an forthoming UK recession (or a "contraction in the economy" if you're a politician) and now its looks like its actually here.

I don't think there's any doubt that the overall ad market will be affected by the financial crisis. Indeed Guy Phillipson, CEO of the U.K. division of the Internet Adverting Bureau has said:

"Online is not immune from the economic downturn, but while other sectors see
falls in expenditure the Internet is still experiencing an incredible increase
and is propping up the entire advertising market."

But indicators are that online advertising spending should continue to rise. Indeed some organisations (e.g. eMarketer) are even predicting its double-digit growth through to 2010.

Online Newspaper Revenue... still dropping

But instead of blaming their monetisation strategy or a declining product, what have they claimed is the reason? .... According to the New York Times the reason is that they have too many adverts.

So, despite online advertising revenues growing, newspapers claim that with a huge site with lots of adverts comes the awful burdon of generating sufficient advertising dollars across all of it. Those days of generating huge online editions that were not only copies of the paper-based product, but enhanced versions with loads of additonal topics/opinions/comments, may be a thing of the past.


Yes, you did read that right. Newspapers online are considering reducing the size and number of adverts they display (and some are already doing it) .

Note: The problem apparently comes when everyone wants to spend money buying up the homepage, but don't care about the rest of it. Therefore newspapers struggle to find the right online ad sizes that they can sell premium advertising revenue for.

To quote media economist Robert Picard,

"newspapers keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner. This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."

Does this mean...

• That newspapers have to buck the current trend of blogging and building social networks to create inventory?
• That they have forgotten about seriously monetising their long-tail of niche content?

Perhaps. Or just possibly as Robert Picard says, "they are just trying too hard".

Human-ise your company

We often think of and describe companies in human terms, its part of our nature to personify and understand. Therefore to encourage this thinking and to bind us to them, better brands usually give themsleves 'attributes' that are human in meaning, such as:

• 'trustworthy'
• 'approachable'
• 'innovatative'

Note: Some companies obviously do this, others just ignore the exercise and make it up as they go along - honest, they do!

This is exemplified in Google's mission statement "Don't be evil", even mentioned in their 'Code of Conduct'. Its partly a way of reflecting how balanced the company wants to be (in everything from its search results to the treatment of its staff in the workplace) and partly a method of separating themselves from Microsoft (often regarded as 'The Evil Empire') . I think this statement (partly a Bill & Ted philosophy and partly a commandment) does a lot to add humanity to a large company.

So how do you describe your company in human terms? And more importantly...
.... how to your customers?

Money markets lose, FT gains

In the last month, where the current financial crisis has caused more than just a few tears in the dealing rooms across the world, one news provider has been smiling.... the Financial Times.

In a recent Reuters interview, FT's CEO John Ridding announced:

1. Sales of the paper has just risen by 20% (Asia & Europe) and 30% (US) from August to September


2. Registrations to FT.com have significantly increased (also boosted by a slight relaxing of their paid content model)


3. Page views are double year-to-date, with a 300% increase on the week of 22 September
   (Goodness knows what they were last week then!)

However, market melt-downs don't happen that often and if you can't plan a profit then I guess you can't plan a financial crisis to benefit from either.... well, most of the city folks can't apparently.

But the FT does have further plans to improve its website, including: adding (more) video, providing more formats (Fancy using a Kindle anyone? No, I didn't think so!) and ignoring the taunts that it is cannibalising its print version.

However upbeat about the benefit of the recent crisis Mr Ridding is, he's also quite sobering in his parting thoughts:

“No one has necessarily nailed the business model in media, but we feel that we’ve got a pretty strong vision and operation.”

Quality in the DNA

We've just spent the last few days in Switzerland at the headquarters of a very large food company (so no hint there then!).

Having ventured again to the land of cuckoo clocks, cheese & chocolate, I became a little heavier, happier and once-again amazed by the professionalism and quality of everyone in the country I've had dealings with. From hotel staff & train conductors, through to store owners & the executives we met, everyone seems to been intent on providing a professional service. When I asked a friend & former colleague why it was that everyone one in the country had this approach he replied:

"Quality is in the DNA here"

Having now returned to the UK, I've now thought more about how other countries, companies and individuals could learn from the Swiss and their approach to quality. In a commoditised world where one product is now so globally similar to another, its nice to know that quality can still make a difference.

In a crisis, remember your customers

I can't really let the financial events of the last few days pass without saying something. But rather than tell you what bank I'm not going to invest in or what mattress my money is hidden under, I'll focus on customer communications happening with Online Bank Icesave (http://www.icesave.co.uk/)

I guess there's a tendancy to forget about customers when you're working for a bank that has not only been nationalised, but when the entire country is teetering on bankruptcy. Or should there be?

Is it really enough to place a message up on your homepage for over 24 hours that merely says:

We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers

Mor recently (today) they have placed a link through tothe UK Govenment's treasury website that explains further the plans to protect UK citizen's savings, but where's the:

1. Regular updates from senior people in Landsbanki (its parent bank - nationalised)
2. Informative statement's from Icelandic Financial Services about the situation
3. Link through to other useful information

Although this bank's fate may be sealed, you wonder what the lack of messaging on other loss-making financial services sites may be doing to easy their customer worries... and therefore what it may be doing to their longer-term reputation.

Trust in different media

When yet another survey is released that states normal people distrust what newspapers say, the same newspapers go on the defensive? Therefore its therefore hardly unsurprising that when a study shows a small variance in these pessemistic figures (e.g. a small rise back in favour of newspapers), the newspapers make a bit of a song and dance about it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2008/sep/12/uk1

However, neither Roy Greenslade nor the report writer Claire O'Sullivan from the research company Metrica, can offer no explaination or even an hypothesis for this upward trend.

:-(

Who's listening?

I've had some rather interesting dealings with a UK energy company recently. No, Ideal Interface hasn't ventured into yet another market segment (we're happy enough consulting with Retail, Financial Services & Travel right now), I've just been trying to sort out the bills for our company office in West London.

Its meant that I've been regularly exposed to the recorded voice, just before I'm connected to a 'Customer Services Representative' saying:

“This call may be recorded or monitored for quality, training or security purposes”

Taking the time to break this sentence down the other day, whilst I was repeatedly put on hold, I realised how bad a job this message does of reassuring the listener.

1. They May be doing this if they want to
2. How is this conversation being stored?
(Note, if you then pay with your credit card is the voicemail system PCI-DSS compliant?)
3. Who's quality, yours or theirs?
4. Training, aren't they not already trained enough to speak with customers?
5. Security? Is for their security not mine?

Surely there must be a better message? Something more likely to provide even a small amount of assurance to their customers that they have their interests at heart, perhaps?

I'll wait to find out. Well, I've been waiting long enough on hold already......

IBM corporate newsletter goes social

IBM are making a big thing recently about their Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Network credentials. Its therefore only fitting that they highlight how this has been of benefit internally for them.

The document below shows how they are leveraging social networks to improve the communications between their staff, current and past, creating an Alumni site which as of July 2008 had 45,000 members.

However, as well as highlighting how IBM is using modern social technology... I can't help but think that they are also using it to cut down on the fragmentation of communication caused by various employees (past and present) setting up networks on: Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Orkut or other publically available social networks.

Social media IBM study - Upload a Document to Scribd

You can also read this document on Scribd: Social media IBM study

The trust of strangers

Purchasing decisions are changing because of customers use of social media. As a consequence almost 40% of retailers are using social networks to reach and influence these peer-to-peer decisions.

However, lets just think about this for a second. We allow others to give us an opinion and depending upon the amount of influence they have, we trust that opinion less or more. Therefore the customers (In reality everyone, for we are all customers of some products & services) are influenced differently, but to some extent we value the input of people we don't know. It is now possible for anyone to influence anyone else.

Before you deny this, consider if you've ever read a review on Amazon before buying a product or checked on the eBay seller before bidding on their item.

On the Internet, information about past transactions may be both limited and
potentially unreliable, but it can be distributed far more systematically than
the informal gossip among friends that characterizes conventional marketplaces.
Resnick & Zeckhauser 2001

This report is interesting as it tries to explain why buyers trust unknown sellers in the "vast
electronic garage sale" known as eBay, which, although isn't a social network to the precise letter of the definition, definately creates a sense of community, feedback and trust.

So, its not suprising then that http://www.universalmccann.com/ have recently published their latest research report entitled "When did we start trusting strangers?".
Hint: Way before social media became a popular term and perhaps we may have to look back even before Mr Resnick & Mr Zeckhauser started their research.

This report identifies a trend called casual influence, showing how its incredibly easy to influence other consumers by using quick voting and recommendations. They indicate that influence and online have almost become one and the same thing, as they put it:

There are so many tools to do this that we no longer have to really think actively about influencing

Food for thought?

Vodka, Petrol & Bankers

What do these three have in common?

Well, in Interbrand's most recent research of the 100 Best Global Brands, the only 3 companies that come from the UK are:

• HSBC - Financial Services (No. 27)
• BP - Energy (No. 84)
• Smirnoff - Alcohol (No.89) - its parent company is Diageo

What relevance is this? Well, as someone from the UK, I see it as a shame that we don't have more. Perhaps its also notable that although this a Global report, 52 of these brands are based in the United States.

The rest of the World is represented as follows:

• Canada : 2
• France : 8
• Finland : 1
• Germany : 10
• Italy : 4
• Japan : 7
• Netherlands : 3
• Republic of Korea : 2
• Spain : 1
• Sweden : 2
• Switzerland : 5

How Responsible is Corporate Social Responsibility?

For a while now I've been suspect of some Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives by large companies. I believe that behind these well-meaning gestures, there is a another reason for them to exist..... its actually good business for the company.

• Reducing your carbon footprint = reducing fuel bills


• Using more recycled materials = making obvious use of lower quality materials


• Allowing staff to participate in public service activities = good PR


• Ethical employment = good PR and a reduced legal bills (or avoided restrictive regulation)

(Note: Someone please remind me that one day I should write a posting about corporate 'Greenwashing'!)

There's also the opinion that during these more economically-challenged times, companies may tend to push their social responsibility agendas down the pecking order (as job survival and a stable balance sheet moves up that order). This isn't entirely true though and some ethics can be recession-proof. Proof is reassuringly provided by Ethical Corporation magazine:

Consumers who already pay a premium for ethical goods such as Fairtrade and
organic produce are unlikely to be put off by an economic slowdown

I've now spent some time recently reading the CSR strategies and approaches of several companies (e.g. Coke's). I've found Tesco's probably the easiest to break up and digest (note: I'll purposely not make any reference to their food), this can be found at: http://www.tescoreports.com/crreview08/managecr.html

Their 6 CSR projects listed for 2008 are:

1. tackling climate change


2. waste recycling and packaging


3. carrier bag use


4. Community Champions


5. making our Community Plan live in store


6. trading fairly (labour standards in our supply chain).

Its suprising how quite a few of these map to my points made earlier. However I applaud the 'carrier bag use' project listed. Figures on numbers vary, but Uk shoppers definately use billions of them in a year. Obviosuly encouraging customers to use less of these will reduce their plastic bill. But Tesco's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, has said that the project will actually cost Tesco money, as they will be over-generous with their green reward points (1p earnt when you re-use you own bag). But just to be clear, we're talking about plastic bags here, which are made from oil, which readers may have noticed has significantly increased in price quite recently.

BTW: Can someone please tell Tesco that their biodegradable carrier bags are most frequently sent to landfill and buried. The only sticking point with this is that these carrier bags degrade naturally.... through expose to sunlight.


On the positive side, its also worth mentioning that through sites such as http://www.actics.com/, it is possible to influence the ethical actions of some (partnered and usually wholey responsible) companies. Hopefully this transparency leads to company advocacy, which then affects the bottom line.

But for me, perhaps the most striking fact is that most customers aren't prepared to pay more for a Socially Responsible product or at best only want to pay a fraction more, despite claiming publically that they would. In additon, MIT research has found out that companies don't need to be entirely socially responsible to gain the rewards brought about from being 100%. Which does then beg the question.. "how ethical do you need to be?".

Perhaps you only need to be ethical until it becomes uneconomical?

The Human Network

Following my posting on Artificial Artificial Intelligence, I was lucky to have this video link sent to me by my great friend Boudewijn.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

Using the idea that games are enjoyable, they can be used to harvest useful information that would be of use to others. It reminds me that I once saw a presentation that stated people use the Internet to either save or waste time, I'm beginning to think that may be the case now (especially as its Friday)

Google now indexes audio

Last week Google announced that it has launched yet another service, GAudi, no-doubt named after Antoni the famous Barcelona Architect. Still in 'Beta' (Google's way of saying "we're not sure if this product is good enough to shout about, we'll let you test it first") this service understands ('listens to') and catalogues the audio used in video clips posted on YouTube. It then allows these clips to be searched in a Google-esque manner.


Currently only USA political-based video's seem to be indexed, but it can't be long before Google Labs points this service as the wider YouTube video index can it?

Old newspapers are still good news for Google

It seems that Google has launched several new services that coincide with the 10th anniversary of its launch . Not content to index all information on the trillion pages of the web , it now plans to index old news archives and make them available via its News Archive Search. This service, a partnership with over 100 newspapers, allows you to view full scanned versions of old fish & chip wrappers that have so-far not been searchable.

A technolgoy adopted from Google Books, this now creates a rich historic resource that theoretically takes the leg-work out of visiting the library and trawling through sheets of micro-fische.


So how useful if this service right now?

Clearly USA-orientated, perhaps it needs to broaden its reach of free resources to be of any use to those on a budget in the UK (e.g. everyone now). For example, conducting a search for one of my journalistic heros, Chapman Pincher (the Daily Express defence correspondent who was most critical of the 1970's Labour Government and the Secret Service at the time) reveals only recent articles or resources that require payment and subscription.

Punit Soni, Google Product Manager's takes more time in his blog posting to explain the service.

Further musings on widgets

The discussion about the use and benefit of widgets rages on. Or is that wages? (well it is if you believe the eMarketer article from mback in April Welcome to the widget wars!) Now they come in new & improved media-streaming, rich advertising formats and are seemingly everywhere.

But are widgets really cutting it?

I can't help but think that currently widgets have grabbed more headlines and attention than they should. Half a year ago widgets were the next great thing, but now?

6 months or so ago widgets were even seen as a the saviour of the newspaper industry (probably why they grabbed so many headlines). The big and apparently new idea was that content syndication leads to revenue sharing (and therefore profit?). Even the Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and New York Times Companies teamed up to create a joint venture called quadrantONE. Formed to sell collective ad space and even monetise content via widgets, this collaboration has gone suprisingly quiet recenty. It will surely soon be asked if they really have added value to their parent companies or the customer yet.


So where are the widget success stories?

Influencing what?

I've used the term Influencer throughout a lot of my postings. These are the people who, by their conversations, comment and other interactions, not only have something to say but additonally have something to say that others will listen to and potentially act upon.

For me, they are the social catalysts, partly (but not entirely similar) to those people mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point book.
Note: I actually disagree with his definition that only specific people are responsible for causing sways in opinion, buying patterns and trust. Instead I think that these people could be anyone, even potentially collections of people. However as I've mentioned before, surely the interesting bit is the 'who' and 'why'.

So what exactly do they influence? Well, assuming they are all talking about their effect on your company, then these people will all apply different actions or factors to your Corporate Social Graph.

Here's my suggestions on what some of those influences could be:

1. Influencing sentiment
   They have an emotional opinion about your company (and the secondary effect of telling others). This sentiment could either be positive or negative and can have an indirect affect on your company.
   Examples: Brand advocates


2. Influencing behaviour
   They have an effect on the sales or take-up (negative or positive) of your products/service. This therefore directly affects your revenue (& profits).


3. Influencing links
   Assuming you already have a website, then links to your site will improve your positons in the key search engines (e.g. Google). What's more, these links can still positively contribute to your SEO efforts, even if the sentiment or behaviour they create isn't.

Proof that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about.

An effective URL strategy and its benefits

The URL and extended URL use on your company website is important for 2 key reasons:


1. It provides a logical navigation structure
Basic usability says that you need to show users where they are in the site structure. Yes, you can provide all the signage/clues/breadcrumbs/etc. but also providing a decent URL path gives your browsing user an informal breadcrumb trail that provides them with further hints as to where they are. Or put it another way, not providing this may mean the difference between your customers finding what they want and not.

For example, just by looking at the URL path on the Adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/productinfo/product-demos/podcasting-software/

You could perhaps decipher that you were looking at some information on one of its products called Captivate. You may even go so far as to think you were on a page that demonstrated how its could be used for podcasting. You would of-course be correct.

However, who would have guessed that this is a link to PC World's Business site to buy this same product? http://www.pcwb.com/catalogue/item/ADOCA004


2. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Real users aren't the only things that read URL's to understand the content. Most web search engines also read the URL and use it in their indexing of the page. This is one of the reasons why blog posting appear so high up in searches for specific phrases.
For example, if you type the following into Google "Customers can be brand evangelists", you get two search results, the top one being:
http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/04/customers-can-be-brand-evangelists.html
(my 14 April posting on the subject)



So if you're thinking about re-developing your new website, remember to ask your technical team what they are doing about the URL structure.

Is TV worried by YouTube?

Surely there is nothing better to arouse suspicions like a senior company executive adamantly denying something? Especially when it’s the executive chairman of the UK’s largest commercial TV company denying that YouTube is a threat.

But imagine he went one step further and started to throw insults about?
What if he claimed YouTube is a “parasite”, living off of TV shows produced by ITV?

You’d then have to believe he was worried, especially when he’d seen its share price drop considerably in the last 6 months (Note: before anyone starts saying that its price has recently rallied, I’ll point out that this increase in price is only fuelled by speculation that its due for a takeover).


Its a shame, especially as ITV recently claimed it needed to extend from 2010 to 2012 the date it would reach it online revenue target of £150m.

The Credit Card is 50 today

On September 18 1958, Bank of America officially launched its first credit cards in Fresno California. These BankAmericards (now known by their more popular brand name of 'Visa') propelled us into the consumer economy by giving normal people instant access to finances they didn't actually have.

And now sitting on the edge of a global recession, promoted in-part by reckless consumer spending, you have to wonder with hindsight.... was it really such a good idea?

French newspaper must evolve or croak

Well well, one of the last bastions of french journalism has woken up and smelt the expensive coffee of the modern age before it is possibly too late. I understand that French newspaper, Le Monde, has just completed the development of its TV studio somewhere in its offices (in Paris I assume).

This facility allows journalists to produce articles and video clips alongside each other for the different versions of its paper, with the video obviously making its way online to support the electronic version.

Well-regarded print-based publications such as this one have done all they can in the past not to venture down this path, with critics stating this should have been something done in the more media-friendly 1990's. This would at-least have given these publications time to learn their craft and they could perhaps even have taken some of the lower-level TV channels on at their own game back then.

Could it also be a cooincindence that Le Monde is also looking to cut 130 jobs by March 2009, all in the name of cost saving?

Reddit!

More doom & gloom?

Here in the UK, we're hearing daily news reports of a forthcoming recession. For the second year running the summer was a wet wash-out and even winning lots of medals at the Olympics in China didn't raise spirits back home for long. So, what's in store for online?

Well, suprisingly its not all bad news, as UK ecommerce is still bucking the downward trend.

According to eMarketer's latest report 'UK B2C E-Commerce:Continued Growth in Tricky Times' 2008 will see an increase of over 28% on 2007 for online sales.





This figure, including online ticketing and digital downloads, is an amazing feat considering the decline in fortunes of High Street stores right now, for example:

• Woolworths £20m loss this year, potentially seeing the beginning of the end for this 99 year old
• Next's Spring/Summer sale volume being 20% down on 2007
• John Lewis, Argos & Homebase are all feeling the pinch

And what's more, predictions are that eCommerce will continue to have significant growth, with the same eMarketer report stating:

online sales will hit £94.2 billion ($169.6 billion) by 2012, although the
annual growth rate will drop below 10%

One thing's for sure... this isn't the online marketplace's recession right now!

What is PR these days?

In looking at the changing role of PR companies for a prospective business venture, I was reminded of a useful blog posting I'd read some while back
"Would PR Rather Not Be Measured? " by Brian Cavoli of Cymphony.
(Note: Its a real shame to see that Jim Nail and the crew at TNS/Cymfony haven't been updating their blog much recently. Perhaps the WPP takeover has taken up too much of their time)

This recent flurry of PR research has led me to observe that PR companies have changed significantly in the last few years, especially as I realised that Brian's article was written over 2 and a half years ago.

But this does beg the question of "what is the modern role of PR?"

Q: Is it to know a small number of media people who can be easily influenced over a dinner and beer?
A: Perhaps, but that's not the main part of their role. Even modern PR people admit you need results not just influence.

Q: Is it to blanket-bomb the same set of journalists and other market commentators on behalf of your client?
A: Errr.... No! Thanks to the long-tail of knowledge and specialisation, there are often far more industry-specific people to set up a dialogue with than general journo-types.

Q: Is it to monitor blogs and other social media on behalf of their clients?
A: Yes! In fact I am aware of more than one PR company that now watches numerous blog feeds at the same time (Indeed, one forward-thinking one has even built a Yahoo Pipes application to filter keyword and terms from numerous RSS sources). They should then provide honest feedback to their clients to enable them to make more informed decisons and communication plans.

Steve Rubel however mentions in a recent posting that perhaps PR is becoming obsolete, especially in the modern technical world. I disagree, but perhaps in the case of the Yahoo-Piping company above, PR may need to be more technical to survive.

Interview with Tim Young, CEO of Socialcast

Last month I received an invite to interview the CEO of Socialcast, a company that provides enterprise-wide on-demand social networking. Having only a small exposure to them previously, I was interested in understand more about their product and its features.

Background
Social Cast was started by Tim Young in June 2005 and provides a SAAS (software-as-a-service) offering to enable companies to have their own private social networks. Their early customers came from the music industry (Universal, Sony, etc.) and in Jan 2007 they won a piece of work for Guitar Centre (the US's largest instrument retailer) to build a Social Network between their headquarters & stores.

HS: So what's the key thing that companies need to establish a social network?
TY: Company culture makes a big difference and to get best use from these social networking tools companies need to work towards establish a culture where there is transparency between staff & management.

HS: What's the best method of getting buy-in for an Enterprise Social Network?
TY: You need both CIO & HR stakeholders; clients get the most success when they approach the solution from both perspectives. HR provides the case for building morale and the CIO looks to build and retain knowledge. Just one of these means the approach can be skewed to just one particular direction.

HS: What helps to build adoption of an Enterprise Social Network?
Taking the work we did for Guitar Centre, this project was helped considerably by having total connectivity between the branches and the centre. This then encouraged viral growth of the service which proved beneficial in its roll-out.

HS: What's a typical roll-out plan?
TY: How its rolled-out is very important. We initially test the application in the first 2-4 weeks with a few users. This can then be increased to 20 or so users to set the tone and get key people comfortable. To then encourage usage further we've found it is beneficial to create some exclusivity, perhaps by making it invitation-only so people see the value. This assists adoption by encouraging scarcity, which actually increases the initial networking effect.

HS: So what's the right size of organisation to have an Enterprise Social Network? Is there an optimum number?
TY: We don't usually look at clients with less than 500 employees & as you don't have enough conversations happening. However it can work with as little as 10 people – the more you make it conversational, the better it works. The level of interaction is definitely dependant upon the internal culture and how employees are valued, its a shift in thinking that makes the difference.

HS: Have you had companies measure the ROI of Enterprise Social Media?
TY: Yes, investing in this technology should be benefit-led. You can obviously measure the basic metrics such as whether people are using the software, but once they are engaged you potentially have a career changing tool. Take for example in retail where you have a high turnover of staff, this affects the amount of training and other support you provide. In the case of one client we have implemented Socialcast for; having this sort of tool has helped to drive down turnover to79% following four successive quarters of 100% turnover. This has a direct affect on the cost of the business. In addition, providing a tool to retain organisational information and can capture the knowledge of older retiring employees.

HS: Does this have more an effect for different generations of users?
TY: Yes, defiantly. The hiring & training of millenials is very different. But this can be overcome by integrating them within the company and finding them mentors to pair with. Millenials are different, even their communication structure is different, its immediate. But they do adopt this sort of technology much easier.

HS: So what's new for SocialCast?
TY: We have a new version of our product coming out in September. This is a dramatic shift in what we're providing and is based upon the feedback we've received from customers & end users.

HS: Can you tell me more?
TY: We're obviously keeping things under-wraps until the launch of Socialcast version 3.0, but I can say that we're launching more Twitter-like functionality for users to share ideas. We've found that brevity works and people find small posts far more approachable. This is compared to blogs, which can take more effort to produce. You need to encourage the conversation and not make people feel guilty about not posting frequently.

HS: So have you been looking at how users communicate in a company to deliver a better product?
TY: Yes, we've looked a lot at why people are connected in an organisation and found that its usually around a set of shared objects. These Enterprise social objects can be anything from photos or videos, through to specific documents. The power of knowledge comes from lots of individuals communicating together. The aim is therefore to get the conversations out of email, which has become an abused silo of information.

HS: How did you decide on the correct functionality for your new version?
TY: We prioritise the functionality from an user-centric view when deciding what to develop. We had small forums where we did some behavioural monitoring, its not just important to capture what users say, but what they do. The software must be used to be useful. It was also important to us to build something that is loved. Consumer software is better to use compared to most corporate software, which can be comparatively dry. Its not just about a functional checklists, its about understanding the needs of your users, the challenges they face and giving them tools they like.

HS: Do you have any plans for the expansion of Socialcast?
TY: Yes, we had a successful implementation in Australia earlier in 2008 and we're ramping up our efforts internationally. We've also signed our first UK client for a trial period, so we should have more news about that soon.

Happy 10th Birthday Google

On 7th September (last Sunday), Google was officially 10 years old as a business and its the most successful web company ever.

However, we should remind ourselves that Google is not as large as some would have you believe and that there are still 3 technology companies out there with a market value larger than Google’s: Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple (in that order). To put this in perspective, Google's net income in the last year has been: $4.85 billion, compared with Microsoft’s of $17.6 billion.
(You'd think they could therefore come up with something better than the 'Bill & Gerry' advert then wouldn't you?)

So, what has Google provided the corporate landscape with so far then?

1. Google AdWords
   The definitive PPC (pay Per Click) advertising model, envied and copied by the competition. Ignore this acquisition model at your peril.
2. Google Talk
   A VOIP (Voice-Over IP) and messaging client (that hasn't taken off as much as Microsoft Instant Messaenger or Skype)
3. Google Picasa
   Their version of Flickr, a photo/image sharing site
4. Google Chrome
   A browser, claimed to be developed for the modern online application (it will be interesting to watch its growth in uptake in 2008)
5. YouTube
   Purchased by Google at the end of 2006, this king of video sharing sites has changed the face of online broadcasting. (What will happen to Google's original video sharing site Google Video in the long run is anyone's guess)
6. Google Docs
   A free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application that may yet challenge the dominance of Microsoft Office.

Oh, and just so happens to have almost 70 percent of the search market sewn up.
So happy 10th birthday Google.

Web2.0 is growing in 2008

I've had a report sitting in my office for several weeks now that I know I should have read . I even admit to feeling guilty each time I moved it to do something else. However, last Saturday I did eventually get around to reading McKinsey's Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results when the wife was out last Saturday and X-factor had finished.

This second annual trend watch analyses the adoption of Web2.0 tools & technologies within businesses. The results of this survey found that whilst 21 percent of the respondents are satisfied with their use of these tools and are seeing changes throughout the enterprise as a consequence, 22 percent said they were dissatisfied. Some even claimed to have stopped using certain technologies altogether, although this appears mainly to be Peer-to-peer technologies, which I think may be as they are increasingly seen as either: a complex media product (e.g. BBC iPlayer) or part of the seedy world of illegal downloads & sharing (e.g. Bit Torrents).

However one of the reports findings, that may well be cause for optimism (especially for developers and vendors) , was that regardless of whether a company was satisfied in Web 2.0 tools & technologies or not, all plan to spend more on them in the future.

The Dutch are first... again

The Netherlands has the largest number of social network users globally (relative to its size) according to this article. Apparently Hyves, LinkedIn and MSN Spaces are the most popular and in that order.

I have to admit, I'm not suprised by this. The Dutch are a very social nation and the only ones I know with just one word to encapsulate "a general feeling of well-being".... "gezellig"!
(Correct spelling thanks to my Dutch friend Boudewijn)

Usability has a commercial impact

According to an earlier article in Internet Retailing, some three-quarters of consumers say that bad usability on a company website has put them off dealing with that orgainisation.

The principles of good website usability have been around for some while, led by people such as Jacob Neilson from his excellent site (http://www.useit.com/) and Jesse James Garrett . The simple rules are there to be followed, some of them include:

• Try to keep you navigation options to around 7
  (There's a very good reason for this and its to do with human short-term memory capacity and other sensible stuff!)
• Tell users what's about to happen and then make sure it happens in the way they expect
• Build your site for the lowest common browser/device, not the latest or greatest (therefore JavaScript is there to enhance functionality, not to break the site when its not used)

I'm therefore amazed that poor website layout and design is such a problem in today's modern eCommerce world. But then I'm also suprised we still have: global poverty, no cure of the common cold and Nylon used to make shirts. As I've previously stated, you can significantly influence your users by providing a positive user experience on your website, but this is the first research I've seen in a while that says a bad User Experience negatively effects the impression that people have of that company.

A few things done well

I'm a great fan of Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, who is known for his Kitchen Nightmares TV program amongst other things. In the show he turns up at a failing restaurant and tries to turn it around, usually shouting repeated expletives in the process. Following his initial observations of the staff & management, he suggests ways they can improve the business and a create a decent product & service. This quite often does actually work, usually if the people concerned follow the advice Chef Ramsay has dispensed.

But what is this wonderful advice then? What wisdom is it that means that restaurants can: cut costs, provide a better product and contribute to a good overall service?

It is to stop producing bad, lazy and fussy dishes. In other words make up a menu of only a few good meals from decent quality ingredients.

Aside from creating great TV, it also dishes out (no pun intended) a sensible set of rules that many companies beyond the restaurant market would do well to follow.

• Base your offering on the talent you have in your organisation
• Simplify your product offering or risk confusing your customer
• Listen to comments, then act quickly and accordingly
• Don't be afraid to listen to the specialist

Now where's the f&£$*ing difficulty in that?

Media Fragmentation

The 'Nichefication' of media has not been an instant thing, created by the arrival of a few online services, its been here for a while.

From magazines for everything, exemplified by the wierd guest publications quoted in the TV programme 'Have I Got New for You', through to the insane TV auction channels that I couldn't help but watch when I was sick and home-ridden recently.

As Bob Liodice, chief executive of the US Association of National Advertisers said in 2004:
“The mass media don’t exist any more”.

This presentation from Peter Hirshberg on the rivalry, inter-dependance and evolution of TV & Web, has got me thinking recently:



Hopefully the future of both combines the richness of TV and the interaction of the web. But one things for sure.. its won't just be one single channel of consumption ever again.

We-Think

I've spent the last few weeks slowly reading the book 'We Think' by Charles Leadbeater. I'm also certain that this book is gaining quite a good general readership right now (especially given the un-referenced but obvious similarity in case studies quoted in this article yesterday in the Sunday Times).

The book, based upon the premise that knowedge shared is more powerful (and fun) than knowledge retained, covers such topics as:
mass innovation
distributed ownership
collaboration
wider cultural change from crowdsourcing (democracy, etc.)
...and a whole bunch of other stuff that got my brain thinking
In fact, looking back, I can now see his influence on my Crowdsouring & News posting.

Here's an introduction to the book, done in a most inventive way





Obviously there are situations where mass collaboration does not work or even backfires and Mr Leadbeater is also quite open about these. Consequently I'd recommend this book, if only for the great case studies, and hope I can find more of them copied in other publications soon.

Visual Networking

I came across this phrase whilst learning more about the merging worlds of communications and entertainment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_networking

In essence it a cross between social media & video. YouTube is perhaps the first real mainstream Visual Networking tool, but here's a clip to give you a better explaination:


What does this mean for a new generation of users & customers?
It means a new way to engage and influence each other.

Facebook for the UK Enterprise?

There is a recent Forrester report entitled 'Facebook for the Enterprise: Catchy Phrase or a Strategy for Collaboration?'. This document highlights several case studies where social networking features have successfully been implemented within large companies.

I should also qualify that what it does not recommend is that companies set up a replica of Mark Zuckerburg's Harvard project to 'poke' their colleagues all day. But it does suggest that companies could use some social networking features to leverage the work of Information & KM professionals to solve business problems. (It also strikes me that if you have an younger workforce who are used to 'personal' social networking sites, that they will find the move to Enterprise Social Networks that much easier). According to Debra Aho Williamson , author of the recent report: B2B Marketing on Social Networks:Engaging the Business Audience

"...marketers will spend far more over the next few years to create and manage their own social networks for business customers, partners, suppliers and vendors"

Note: I'm currently writing up an interview I did for a magaine with Tim Young CEO of Socialcast, who are an on-demand provider of corporate social networks. He also provides several interesting examples (which I'll publish here soon hopefully).

However, all the examples I've seen of companies who have done this are based in the USA. So why have no UK organisations seemingly not stepped into this arena yet? Well UK companies may be willing to consider it following a recent survey that gave 88 percent of delegates (surveyed at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and the Web 2.0 Strategies event in London) as eager to start using social networking for the business. In fact, 94% of the UK businessese surveyed believe social networking would be beneficial to use at work. This compared to 82% of US organisations.

So who did this research? That will be http://www.trampolinesystems.com/ , the UK's own provider of Enterprise Social Network products.

Artifical Artificial Intelligence

The Turk was an amazing device, built in the 1800's it was used to demonstrate to Royalty how clever a machine could be by playing chess against a human. The Turk was later exposed as a hoax, when it was revealed that there was actually a human inside it. (Note: It was not until Deep Blue that a real computer beat a chess champion 1997)

No matter how you define artificial intelligence (The Turing Test probably being the most well know), there is no case as yet of its official existence. However, what if you could ask a website a complex question or ask it for a task to be performed and get the results within minutes? What if you could ask the equivalent of a modern-day intelligent machine?

It sounds pretty amazing and it is. But its not computer effort that's primarily being used in Amazon's Mechanical Turk, its human effort. This service, run by Amazon uses a crowdsourcing method to send requests to a number of people and to have the results paid for only if the answers are correct / good enough. These Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT's) trade people's time & effort for a small reward. In fact I've heard of several night-shift security guards in the UK who have topped up thier earnings whilst keeping people safe in their beds at night.

So how does this help a company?

Well, it gives you access to a global workforce, instantly. From transcribing audio files (e.g. podcasts or CEO speaches to make them accessible), to writing reviews for local services(perhaps something Yelp should take note of), this uses the long tail of resourcing.

All I now need it to do is ask it to how to play chess......

Building branded communities... why not?

I'm still pleasantly suprised that the "buy or build" conversation comes up so much in relation to social media web functionality. But, I guess its good that potential clients are still asking what's involved in developing their own offering, despite the availability of so many white cost-effective white-label and hosted solutions.

But what do you do when you build it and they don't come? What if there is no Field of Dreams?

I had this recently when a start-up I know built a community part of its website and nobody used it. My first question to ask is "what were you expecting?". You wouldn't produce a product and not advertise it. Somehow they thought that a site would instantly create evangelic users who would encourage thousands of others, whilst instantly appearing top in Google of all keywords. (How I laughed... when I walked out of the room)

Then there's the case that visitors come, look around and disappear. Why? Well they don't find anything of interest! Either your navigation or search doesn't let them find what they want.. or worse still... your community isn't.. errrr... communicating correctly.

The worst thing happens is when brands ignore existing communities and try to set up their own in competition. .Partly through ignorance and partly from arrogance, this is commerical madness and will potentially see companies throw money at something they need not do. It may also create confusion and fragment conversations, making tracking & measurement harder.

So next time your CMO walks over and says something like "we need to build a community", forget what you see in films.